Business process management, which are essentially workflow and tracking software applications, enable a company to automate and track business processes, also called “workflows,” that it uses frequently in its operation. For example, a company may use workflow tracking software to individually track the status of each of the number of different instances of an expense approval process, each of which must go through several different actions involving several different people.
To use such a workflow tracking application for a particular process, the company first defines the process in the workflow tracking application, such as by specifying the different actions that must be performed as part of the process, by whom, and in what order. Each time an instance of the process is started, the workflow tracking application is notified to identify the instance. Each time an action of the process is completed for an instance of the process, the workflow tracking application is notified so they can update its representation of the status of the instance.
Unfortunately, conventional workflow tracking applications have limited ways to display process instance status information for access and use by business users. In particular, these workflow tracking applications tend to display status information for one process instance at a time. Accordingly, a user of the workflow tracking application that wishes to understand the status of a large number of instances of a process must review individual reports on the status of each instance, and himself or herself aggregate this detailed information.